Official SEOW

Hello Shades,

I am planning the MI campaign, and I was thinking about a possible feature which could be very nice, when planning large strike packages.
The problem I am encountering is planning multiple bomber flights so that they are well organized in the air, mutually-supportive and so that in general they give an air of awesomeness when encountered by a human pilot. It is very hard to click a near identical flight path for multiple flights, so that they stay close together. Therefore, I am thinking about a dynamic Task Force feature for flights.

How would it work, and what would be the features Devill? I am glad you ask!

Lets go here step by step:

1. create a Strike Package (SP), select the lead flight.

2. add available flights to the SP (from any available airbase/CV; as long as the flight is available for tasking)

3. select parameters of the formation (trail, box, staggered, etc) as well as spacing (lateral, vertical for each consecutive member) - little graphic interface here as for the infantry formations would be awesome...

4. define a gathering point; here, the lead flight will have to wait for a preset amount of time in order to assemble the formation. All members will automatically have this point as their first waypoint, with a maximum allowed speed setting. A dialog box gives a warning if any of the members will take an excessive amount of time to join the formation.

5. rest of the waypoints are as usual, except the mission planner coordinates for all flights are automatically generated with respect to their position vs the lead flight. I guess you could do the same thing as for escorting flights?

6. define a disperse point, where each flight will be assigned its own final landing waypoint, so that every flight has time to return to their own base, no transfers.

What do you think Shades? Sorry if this comes at a bad moment, I know you are mostly interested in the ground stuff now.

On another note, did you ever take a look at a possibility to apply SEOW to Cliffs of Dover?

Hope to talk to you sometime soon on TS. Maybe we could play that game of Panzer General which we talked about a long time ago?

Cheers!

Hi Devill,
You must have been talking with Badger - he asked about something similar a couple of years ago involving bomber boxes. It is possible to write this type of thing of course, and it is essentially how escorts are done now. But what you need to establish first is how robust such a feature would be in practice, for human pilots, for AI and for mixtures of human and AI. What aircraft types are suitable for use, how to form up and disperse etc. No point in building a new feature if it leads to increased collision rates etc, or doesn't actually achieve a pleasing outcome.
So prove to me you know how to get a reliable result in FMB for a wide range of airframes and formations, then we can talk about how to build that into the MP and DCS.

Ground war stuff in IF is about to be revised a bit based on Kiev learnings, but I am happy to add air war features that promise to be reliable, sensible and well used.

And, yes, a PzGen joust would be fun! Drop by TS soon!

Cheers
4S

Hmmm, fair enough!

Hehehe, no, I didn't talk to Badger! The thing is we are doing the Midway, and you know Diego; he likes a "sky blackened with planes" type of a campaign. So, since we don't have a lot of humans, I am trying to plan the missions basically with AI bombers and humans as escorts. So, I am having difficulty in getting a proper "density" of bomber planes. It is much more of an eye candy than useful, but it could be also useful.

Anyway, I'll try to do some tests in the FMB and will let you know if I get somewhere with it.

When can I find you on TS? Sunday mornings (european time)?

Cheers mate!

Hi Devill,
I am GMT+8, and usually on in my mornings and evenings. That would be like you late nights or mid-afternoons on weekends.
Cheers
4S

Hi Shades,

I may have an idea about how this feature could work, and it may be very simple: force air start.

I will continue testing, but just wanted to let you know I was still tinkering with this.



Merry Christmas to you and all who celebrate it today! Best wishes!!!

Cheers,
4S